maybe next time
by seemslikeaporno
Summary: There's nothing stopping you, now.


**maybe next time **

**summary**: there's nothing stopping you, now.  
**disclaimer**: victorious does not belong to me.

.

(_tori vega_)

She's popular until it actually counts.

Then she just stops existing.

She goes to a performing arts college and feels like a little fish in a big pond. She smiles her thousand dollar smile, but the girl beside her has a grin worth a million. She sings her heart out but the gay boy in the front of the room sings the same songs ten times better. She's pretty but someone out there is prettier, and she's skinny but some paper doll calls her fat in this catty voice and, well, Tori doesn't know how to argue.

So she stops eating, and she becomes a paper doll, herself – but she looks in the mirror and all she can see is _fat_ hanging from her bones.

_you're disgusting, you're ugly, you're FAT (that's why Beck never loved you). _

She cries and screams at the girl in the mirror and eats a whole pizza then throws it up because she feels so bad. She runs a mile a day on nothing but a bottle of water and a cup of cereal. Her hair thins, her eyes dim, her skin starts to feel like paper, but she's _still._ _not._ _skinny._ _enough_.

People ask if she's feeling okay, (_you look pale_, _doll_) and she says _no_, then laughs and adds, _but it's worth it to be pretty._

_._

(_trina vega_)

Nobody really says much about Tori's sister, _whatsherface_.

But when she gets out of high school she stars in four low-budget horror films and never walks on the red carpet, but knows how to walk to get the boys to slide their hands up her too-short skirt.

Nothing else is really worth mentioning.

(Except maybe that she dies of a drug overdose at twenty-six and she gets a small section on the fourth page of a newspaper and they spell her name _wrong_ and nobody cares.)

TINA VEGA, ACTRESS, DIES IN APARTMENT.

.

(_beck oliver_)

His full name is Beckett James Oliver III, and he looks and acts and pretends like he's a prince from the fairytales.

He has yet to find a girl that doesn't want him in Hollywood Arts. Pretty Princess Vega wants him, Crazy Cat Valentine wants him, even the Wicked Witch of the West wants him. In Hollywood, it's exactly the same.

He parties with some of the most famous people and some of the least, sleeps with random girls every night, and holds his liquor like the best of them (or the worst, depending on your outlook on things). He lands every movie role he tries out for, sells a million copies of his CD even though he can't sing, and travels everywhere he's always wanted to go on half-price plane tickets.

But prince charming isn't so charming when it comes right down to it.

He starts smoking cigarettes, starts snapping at the girls he sleeps with if they stick around for a little too long, starts rejecting call after call from his agent, his manager, his friends.

He convinces himself that no one will give a shit about his absence as long as he comes back; so he spends night after night after night in the same, rundown hotel room until he can't take the smell of sex and sweat and liquor and cigarette smoke anymore.

Instead of going back, he moves into the room next door. Then the room next door to that one. And the hotel managers don't care as long as he keeps paying them.

After a month and a half, he finally packs his things to return. He lights his cigarette. Then, in a moment of pure desperation and anger and loneliness and liberation, he sets the room aflame.

He gets out alive.

(But he's not so pretty anymore with those burn marks running up and down his face, is he?)

.

(_cat valentine_)

The day she turns nineteen, she wishes upon a star for the first time since she was eleven years old.

She would tell you what it was, but she's afraid that if she does, it won't come true; so she doesn't breathe a word about it and simply flies through life in the fast lane and forgets to smell the roses and the daisies and the tulips at her feet.

She moves to the country and decides that she wants to write poems; when that doesn't work out, she writes a play, then a movie, then a book that never gets published.

Then she meets _this boy_ and he makes her smile too big and laugh too hard and hope too much. The sun shines twice as bright and the sky is three times as blue and the roses are four times as red and everything always smells like vanilla cupcakes when he's around – and the best part is, he doesn't think she's weird or crazy or odd like everyone else; he says she's special and beautiful and perfect, and, well, she's never been called that before.

Then she tells him what she wished for when she was nineteen –

_I wish I could find true love!_

And he says, _Well, you found it_, with a smile in his eyes. When he kisses her, her stomach hops and her eyes sparkle and she feels like her heart skips a beat or two (or maybe even three!).

Then she wakes up one rainy morning in a white room and he's gone. She blinks once, staring around a room that doesn't feel like hers, and someone in a white coat rushes in and pushes her back onto the bed, shouting something she can't quite hear or understand to another person.

"What's going on?" She asks, but nobody answers, "What's going on? _What's going on?_" She kicks and screams and is held down by people with strong arms. "_What's going on?_"

Then a needle goes into her arm and she laughs because the sunshine comes back.

.

(_jade west_)

Beck dumps her right out of high school and she kills herself.

Her mother doesn't go to her funeral, and neither does anyone else that matters.

.

(_andré harris_)

He doesn't have the option of leaving home after high school because his grandmother needs him.

So he stays.

He cooks her breakfast and tucks her in at night and plays her songs on the piano (but he's restricted to Beethoven and Chopin because she hates everything else). She breaks his computer again and he has to get a second job to help fix it. He comes home every night to her yelling, "Is that you, André?"

She never stops hiding; she becomes delirious. One day, she hits André over the head with a lamp and he's knocked out for three hours straight. Another, she grabs the kitchen knife from his hand while he's cutting vegetables and cuts herself.

When she tears off the keys of his piano, André loses it.

He climbs out of the upstairs window, steals the car, and drives until he runs out of gas on the side of an unfamiliar road. He crawls into the backseat, curls up into a ball, and sobs.

He should have known he was never meant to make it.

.

(_robbie shapiro_)

Robbie defies all logic and limits and becomes a comedian.

He travels first class, drinks wine with the refined part of Hollywood, and meets Oprah. He goes to dinner parties, ends up starring in a few movies, two of which end up in theatres, makes an album (it doesn't sell as well as Beck's, but it _sells_, and people _love_ _him_), and does everything that people said he couldn't do.

The best part? He does it all _without_ Rex.

It does wonders for his self-esteem.

.

**a/n**: i know this type of story/plot is ridiculously overdone, but i tried to make mine a tad different than the others; like, instead of the normal "tori is perfect so she will fail blah blah" bullshit, i went with an eating disorder because she finds out she's not perfect _enough_. and i think i'm one of the only people to actually give trina more than just one line BECAUSE I CARE lolnotreally. plus, i wrote this in a different order, and placed them so the feeling would be a tad lighter at the end. not sure if it worked or not, but hey, i attempted. and big thanks to **dramatic starlet **and **lovely amelie** for both writing a story with this sort of format, because they both inspired mine. thanks so much for reading, and i hope you enjoyed! :)


End file.
